TO: |
Democratic Members,
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FROM: |
Jeff |
RE: |
Recommended Approach to Gorsuch
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supreme court
Spidey decisis
The final paragraphs of this morning’s opinion of the Supreme Court in Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC—a patent case involving Spider-Man web-shooters—in which the Court’s decision turned on whether it would overrule its prior decision in Brulotte v. Thys Co., 379 U.S. 29 (1964):
One of Justice Kagan’s clerks is having a really, really good day today.
Good textualism vs. bad textualism
Around here, the reaction to President Obama’s speech at the Catholic Health Association conference a couple of days ago, where the President called out the “cynicism” underlying the petitioners’ claims in King v. Burwell – being the second attempt by die-hard Obamacare opponents to recruit five willing executioners on the Supreme Court – was nothing short of hysterical. In addition to the usual attacks on the President’s disrespect for the rule of law and Nietzschean impulses, there was renewed finger-wagging to the effect that the language in dispute is not a “a drafting error or a typo” but rather stands on its own as wholly dispositive of the matter at hand.
So, while we wait for the ruling to come down, let’s read the amicus curiae brief filed by Eskridge, et al., and see statutory interpretation done as God and Oliver Wendell Holmes intended. The introduction and summary of argument:
The court of appeals held that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) does not prohibit the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from providing tax credits to individuals who purchase health insurance on exchanges created by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Petitioners challenge that conclusion on the sole ground that seven words in 26 U.S.C. § 36B – “established by the State under section 1311” – foreclose tax credits on HHS-created exchanges. The text, they say, is clear, so by holding otherwise, the court below elevated statutory purpose over statutory text.
But this is not, as Petitioners suggest, a case about textualism vs. purposivism. It is a case about good textual analysis vs. bad textual analysis. Textualism does not require courts to read statutory provisions in a vacuum. To the contrary, it is a “fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.” FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U.S. 120, 133 (2000) (internal quotation marks omitted). By focusing exclusively on Section 36B’s seven words in isolation, Petitioners violate textualism’s core tenets and adopt an interpretation that would nullify the Act as a whole.
Modern textualism developed as a response to purposivism, which held that the letter of the law must yield to legislative “intent.” A search for legislative intent, textualists have explained, violates the constitutionally prescribed process of bicameralism and presentment: The only “law” to interpret is the text of a statute passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president. By combing the legislative history for indicia of legislative intent, moreover, purposivist analysis risks substituting judicial judgment for the judgment of Congress. Thus, by focusing on the text of a statute – rather than on ethereal notions of legislative “intent” – textualism cabins judicial discretion, respects legislative supremacy in the policymaking process, and renders the interpretive process more predictable.
But textualism is not hyperliteralism, and textualists do not read the words of a statute in a vacuum. To the contrary, “reasonable statutory interpretation must account for both ‘the specific context in which … language is used’ and ‘the broader context of the statute as a whole.’” Utility Air Regulatory Grp. v. EPA, 134 S. Ct. 2427, 2442 (2014) (quoting Robinson v. Shell Oil Co., 519 U.S. 337, 341 (1997)). Thus, a statutory phrase that has one apparent meaning when read in isolation may have a different meaning when read in the context of the statute as a whole.
King v. Burwell – place bets gentlemen
Before oral arguments even begin this morning, I’m going to go way the hell out on a limb and predict the final outcome.
It will be 5-4 in favor of the government. Either (i) Roberts will write the opinion of the Court, joined by Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor, or (ii) there will be no majority opinion, with Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas on one side, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor on the other, and Roberts siding with the government but writing only for himself. There is a slight possibility that Kennedy would join a majority opinion, leaving Roberts free to hang with the boys, but I’m counting on him to flake out with a literalist approach to the statutory language.
I take it as a given that Chevron deference to agency interpretation is a dead letter with the Court’s right wing, at least when the agency is the IRS and a Democrat is in the White House. But the more interesting discussion – which I expect to dominate today’s argument – is around Constitutional federalism and the Pennhurst doctrine, basically the idea that if Congress is going to place conditions on States’ entitlement to federal funding, it had better do so clearly and unambiguously, sort of like an “actual notice” requirement. Whatever else those four words in 26 U.S.C. § 36B may mean to a committed textualist, no one can seriously claim that Section 36B put States on Pennhurst-worthy notice that they would lose Obamacare subsidies if they didn’t set up their own exchanges. But since Alito, Scalia and Thomas have given up on being serious, that is probably what they will in fact claim.
Again assuming that Kennedy joins the nihilists, I think Roberts will use Pennhurst to thread the needle, prevent a humanitarian disaster and, once again, be the lonely steward of the Court’s reputation. His one-man opinion will uphold the IRS regulations, essentially by saying that if the IRS had instead withheld Obamacare subsidies from states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, it would have violated principles of Constitutional federalism under Pennhurst. The four liberal Justices may join Roberts’ opinion (making it an opinion of the Court), but I think it’s at least as likely that they will write their own opinion, basically on Chevron or general “don’t waste my time with this nonsense” grounds. The main reason I think that may happen is because Roberts will go a little too far with his Pennhurst logic in an attempt to snatch a conservative victory from the jaws of Obamacare defeat, and try to sneak in a brand new way for States to challenge federal mandates. (That federalism stuff is dangerous, I tell you.) So Roberts will be on his own, much as he was with his taxing power argument in NFIB v. Sebelius.
Well. Now I’m feeling exposed. Still, I hope I’m right. All this nifty argumentation aside, if the challengers win this one, with full knowledge of how many people will die as a direct result, they’re not just vandals – they’re terrorists.
Obamalypse now
“Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” (abridged version), published October 22 by Focus on the Family Action, a Christianist lobbying group affiliated with James Dobson’s Focus on the Family organization. Happy birthday, Jesus.
October 22, 2012
Dear friends,
The 2008 election was closer than anybody expected, but Barack Obama still won. Many Christians voted for Obama – younger evangelicals actually provided him with the needed margin to defeat John McCain – but they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far-Left policies that had marked his career. They were wrong.
On January 20, 2009, President Obama’s inauguration went smoothly, and he spoke eloquently of reaching out to Republicans who would work with him. Even in the next month, when Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens announced they would step down from the Supreme Court, nobody was very surprised – Ginsburg was already 75 years-old and in ill health, and Stevens was 88. President Obama nominated two far-Left, American Civil Liberties Union-oriented judges, and the Democratic Senate confirmed them quickly. They are brilliant, articulate and in their early 40s, so they can expect to stay on the court for 30 or 40 years. But things seemed the same because the court retained its 4-4 split between liberals and conservatives, with Justice Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote.
The decisive changes on the Supreme Court started in June, when Justice Kennedy resigned – he was 72 and had grown weary of the unrelenting responsibility. His replacement – another young liberal Obama appointment – gave a 5-4 majority to justices who were eager to create laws from the bench. The four conservative justices who remained – John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – were suddenly in the minority.
Then in August 2009, two months after Kennedy resigned, Justice Scalia unexpectedly announced his resignation due to health reasons and by October 2009 another Obama appointment took his oath and joined the court. Finally the far-Left had the highest prize: complete control of the Supreme Court. And they set about quickly to expedite cases by which they would enact the entire agenda of the far Left in American politics – everything they had hoped for and more took just a few key decisions.
The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that homosexual “marriage” was a “constitutional” right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws barring same-sex “marriage” violated the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Suddenly, homosexual “marriage” was the law of the land in all 50 states, and no state legislature, no state Supreme Court, no state Constitutional amendment, not even Congress, had any power to change it. The Supreme Court had ruled, and the discussion was over. President Obama repeated his declaration that he personally was against same-sex “marriage”, but he told the nation there was nothing he could do.
After the jump: men & boys, TV porn, inner-city crime, Muslim terror, Russian empire, the Fairness Doctrine, euthanasia and more.